With great fanfare, Gov. Jerry Brown, and Assemblyman Jim Wood announced that the Governor’s new state budget allocates 1.5 million dollars of state funds to clean-up environmental damage caused by illegal marijuana grows here in the Emerald Triangle, aka Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity Counties. Jerry Brown got it right when he said “These illegal grow sites do untold damage to forests and wildlife along the North Coast.”

Anyone who walks in the woods around here can see the legacy of environmental destruction from 40 plus years of illegal marijuana production. These forests are strewn with everything from irrigation line, soil bags and butane canisters, to fertilizers, pesticides and rat poison, to generators, appliances and vehicles, and what you find in these woods will boggle your imagination. I’ve seen trucks, bulldozers and mobile homes, wedged into narrow crevices, on steep slopes, deep in the forest, far from the nearest road. I don’t know how they got there and I have no idea how you would get them out.

In his press release, Assemblyman Wood brought up some of the problems they hope to address with this $1.5 million: Banned pesticides, rat poison, fisheries restoration, chemical ponds, excavation pits, trash, generators, storage tanks, abandoned weapons and illegal clear-cuts that create a fire hazard, “All of this creates a dangerous environment for firefighters, law enforcement and recreational hikers.” Wood’s press release informs us.

True enough, but how much will $1.5 million really do? Mendocino County Supervisor John McCowan told Ashley Tressel of the Ukiah Daily Journal, “It’s a nice start, but it’s really a drop in the bucket.” adding, “Frankly, State agencies have not been doing a good job of preventing environmental damage.” There, Supervisor McCowan refers to the explosion of new, large scale, illegal grows that have proliferated now that Mendocino County has refocused it’s energy away from marijuana eradication, and onto bringing cannabis permit applicants into compliance with state and county regulations.

With the exponential growth in the industry of late, the large scale, illegal clear-cuts, grading and water diversions going on right now, under legalization, may well dwarf the entire environmental legacy of the War on Drugs. Acting Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal said he hoped to use Humboldt County’s share of this money to hire three new deputies to the Humboldt County Marijuana Task Force, presumably to stop the environmental destruction that is going on right now. “We need more resources and more deputy sheriffs dedicated to these illegal grows,” Honsal told Will Houston of the Eureka Times-Standard. However, diverting this money to law-enforcement would leave the environmental legacy of the War on Drugs, the unopened buckets of rat poison, the jugs of used motor oil, the leaky diesel tanks, the dams, the stream diversions and the storage ponds, to wreck havoc on wildlife for decades to come.

It remains unclear how the money will be allocated among the three counties. “These funds will go to our well-established Fisheries Restoration Grant Program which was created to address declining populations of wild salmon and steelhead trout, and deteriorating fish habitat in California,” said California Department of Fish and Wildlife Director Charlton H. Bonham. “The $1.5 million will help us continue to clean up the egregious environmental damage, specifically to California’s waterways, caused by illegal marijuana cultivation sites.”

How far will $1.5 million go? “It can cost up to $15,000 to clean-up and restore each acre damaged,” according to State Senator Bill Monning. I’m quoting the senator from a 2015 LA Times article by Patrick McGreevy about new (at the time), civil penalties that could compel busted growers to cover the cost of the environmental damage they cause. I’m sure the cost to clean-up an acre has not gone down any since then. At that rate, this new, $1.5 million dollar allocation will clean up about 100 acres. 100 acres!

Thanks to the ongoing insanity of the War on Drugs, we have over 8,000 active marijuana grows in Humboldt County alone, not to mention tens of thousands of abandoned grow sites in the forest. Mendocino and Trinity Counties have similar situations. In this vast expanse of rugged, remote, mountainous forest, cops and cultivators have played a high stakes game of cat and mouse for more than forty years, littering some of California’s best remaining wildlife habitat with poison and trash.

Today, highly capitalized interests, run roughshod over regulations and ignore environmental consequences in their quest to corner the market in this newly legalized industry. Meanwhile counties scale-back law enforcement and turn marijuana violations over to code enforcement, who attempt to implement regulations and issue permits. We see unprecedented, and unmitigated environmental damage from marijuana cultivation going on all over the Emerald Triangle right now, but thanks to assemblyman Wood’s “leadership”, the state is going to clean-up 100 acres in three huge counties.

It’s a good thing they put out a press release about this $1.5 million. Otherwise no one would have ever noticed the impact of such a tiny investment spread over such an enormous area.

I hear a lot of debate about vaccines these days, and I think it’s an interesting topic because of what it reveals about our current zeitgeist. I’ve hesitated to say anything about the subject, because the decision of whether or not to vaccinate children is generally made by parents, and it’s hard for me to think of anyone crazy enough to bring a child into this world as capable of making intelligent decisions. However, I can see why an intelligent parent, if in fact they exist, might reasonably, or even wisely, choose not to have their child immunized as thoroughly as the State of California now demands for all public school students.

I understand the value of vaccines. My dad had polio. He had a withered left leg and walked with a severe limp from the time he was five years old. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Today, they’ve nearly wiped polio out with the Salk and Sabin Vaccines, but still, cases do turn up, especially in densely populated areas with poor sanitation. Polio remains a threat, in part because many people who live in areas still affected by polio, resist immunization themselves, and refuse to immunize their children. I understand how wonderful it would be to live in a world where no one ever got polio again, but I also understand why even the people most effected by polio would vehemently resist taking the vaccine.

Polio is a terrible disease, but polio is not an evil disease. My dad got polio because he grew up in Philadelphia, trapped in a maze of concrete, teeming with malnourished, alcoholic humans, choked with soot, sewage and industrial waste. My dad got sick because of the wretched conditions he endured as a child. Instead of making life better for children, the Salk Vaccine made it possible for more children to endure and survive such horrid conditions. That’s what vaccines do. Vaccines allow people to survive in unhealthy conditions, and as conditions deteriorate, we require more and more vaccines to endure them.

We use vaccines to override nature’s population control functions. Meanwhile, overpopulation remains the biggest threat to life on Earth and the leading cause of poverty and human suffering. While vaccines save lives, they don’t make life better, and they don’t lead to a brighter future. Also, the risk, benefit analysis of all vaccines is not the same. Your veterinarian will tell you that before your doctor will, but it’s true. I caught mumps, measles and chicken pox in public school, along with all of my class mates, and we all survived. Not every vaccine fights a disease as terrible as polio or small pox, and not every vaccine is as effective as the Salk vaccine, but every vaccine has it’s own distinct list of side-effects and interactions.

I don’t want to debate the science of vaccines, because the people who believe in Science, are eager to bludgeon people with it. In truth, I think the difference between the pro-vaccination and anti-vaccination camps has more to do with perspective and values than it does with facts and science. I think it’s an issue upon which reasonable people can disagree, and where we disagree, says a lot about where we are, as a culture.

As science has ascended to the status of religion in our culture, it is not enough for science to describe our world to us. Science needs to inspire us with the promise of a brighter future, and save us from impending doom. Science needed a mythology, and vaccines have become a critical part of the mythology behind Science, the religion. Here’s how the story goes:

Through vaccines, Science has saved millions of lives. Small pox, rabies, polio, tuberculosis, these diseases plagued mankind before the advent of Science, but once scientists developed vaccines for these diseases, people stopped dying from them. Fewer people dying means more lives saved. The mathematical calculation of how many lives vaccines have saved is a critical component to the mythology of this new religion.

This calculation must be unassailable in it’s methodology, and honest about it’s margin of error, and it must show that vaccines have saved millions of lives, and the number of lives saved by vaccines must continue to rise. Science needs to save a lot of lives with vaccines, because from time to time, science kills and maims a lot of people. From thalidomide babies, surgical accidents and the known side-effects of prescribed medications, to DDT, Love Canal, and Fukushima, science has killed and maimed a whole lot of people. For Science to serve as our religion, the number of lives destroyed by science must seem insignificant compared to the number of lives it has saved, and giving someone a vaccine is about the cheapest and easiest way to “save” someone that Science can get.

From another, equally scientific, perspective, one may ask: In a world where a hundred or more species of plant and animal go extinct every day, why should we care so much about saving human lives? Why should we support and participate in these efforts to override nature’s population control systems when it inevitably leads to a lower quality of life, and more environmental destruction? Maybe the better world you envision for your child is not one which hosts the largest possible human population. You may, quite reasonably, feel that what’s best for your child’s future is not what the Church of Science demands of you.

It’s not that people don’t believe the statistics, or understand the concept. I think they do understand. They understand that technological fixes, like vaccines, usually cover up, and spawn bigger problems than they solve. People have seen enough to know that science doesn’t make life better. People have seen enough of science to recognize the pattern that starts with a great discovery, followed by promises of a brighter future, succeeded by “God help us. What have we done?” I think we have entered an age where people regret science.

The anti-vaccination movement tells me that death and disease no longer frighten us as much as the horrors unleashed by science, and that people no longer believe that Science will bring them a better tomorrow. People have learned to mistrust Science, not because of superstition, or lack of understanding, but because of experience. We’ve seen enough of Science to recognize it for what it is, and now that we understand science, we realize that we’d better trust nature.

A couple of weeks ago they held the first national March for Science. I love science, and I have a deep appreciation for science and scientific inquiry. I don’t trust scientists, however, and I’m very suspicious of their political agenda, so I did not feel inclined to join them in this demonstration. For as much as I love science, I don’t worship it. In fact, I think it’s kind of a bad cultural habit, but it’s one I picked up early, so I try to make the most of it.

I understand the science behind the Climate Crisis, and I know why ecologists say we have entered the sixth great extinction event in the history of life on Earth. I appreciate that many scientists recognize the grave threat we face from these crises, and I know that they hope to raise awareness about why we should pay attention to this kind of science, but I also know that scientists led us down this road to ruin in the first place, and their siren song continues to seduce us at our peril.

A lot of people tell me that they think science has made us smarter, and that the technology it spawned has made life better, but they could hardly be more wrong. Quite the opposite, in fact. Science may have changed our cultural mythology, but it has failed to reform our culture in any significant way. Meanwhile, technology has unleashed the deadliest holocaust on planet Earth since an asteroid strike wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. That’s what science tells us about science and technology.

The objective evidence gathered in the field of ecology should disabuse us of any delusions of grandeur we derive from the mental masturbation we call quantum mechanics and theoretical physics. According to the World Wildlife Federation’s Living Planet Report of 2016, global wildlife populations, declined by 58% between 1970 and 2012, due primarily to human activity. That means there are less than half as many wild animals on Earth today, as there were on the first Earth Day. Science and technology had a large part in making these numbers a reality. Does that sound smart? Does that sound like an improvement?

Far from an intellectual advance, science has merely replaced one ludicrous myth with another. We replaced the myth of an omnipotent deity who created the world and molded humanity in his own image with the myth of a giant bomb that exploded out of nothing. They’re both stupid, and they’re both wrong and neither of these myths have made us any smarter. We’ve merely replaced the guys in monasteries who wore robes and studied ancient texts with guys in universities who wear lab-coats and peer into microscopes. Beneath them both lies the same pathological, ecocidal culture we call “civilization.” Instead of bestowing wisdom, science usurped the power of the church, creating a new religion based on the same old stupidity.

Here’s an example that illustrates how scientists dress up the same old medieval religious stupidity in the new clothes of secular science: Darwin theorized, not that we humans descended from apes, but that we are apes, and that we are but one specialized species of animal in a great pantheon of specialists. This, generally accepted, scientific theory of the origin of species, should have laid to rest the religious idea that God made man in his own image, and blown that “dominion” shit right out of the water, but these Medieval ideas remain as strong as ever, especially among scientists, because universities continue to teach scientists to view human beings as the only intelligent species on planet Earth, and the only ones capable of determining our own destiny. Most scientists still presume the superiority of the human intellect, and believe that the millions of other, “inferior,” species upon this planet exist purely for our benefit, to study, displace, or even kill for sport, just because those creatures don’t share our particular specialty. How is that different from any other form of chauvinism?

Businessmen and politicians use science in exactly the same way they used religion in medieval times: to control the masses and to give them an advantage in war. Instead of buying indulgences, they now invest in clean technology, or hire a panel of experts. Instead of asking the Pope to bless their military campaigns and inspire their troops, the military now pays universities to research and design new weapons, including psychological ones.

Both scientists and the clergy gained power over the masses by performing magic tricks, and promising salvation. Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, while scientists point to “Trinity,” the first detonation of a nuclear bomb. Christianity promises life after death. Science promises a brighter future through technology.

The fact that we still fall for this BS, even though industrial technology invariably creates much bigger problems than it solves, demonstrates our willful ignorance and cultural intransigence. In reality, we’re no closer to understanding how the universe works, today, than we were 500 years ago, or even five thousand years ago, and modern Americans are probably the stupidest creatures to ever walk the face of the Earth, thanks largely to science and technology.

When you consider science from the perspective of how it has affected our culture, I hardly see science as an improvement over religion. Trading religion for science is kind of like trading The New Yorker for Penthouse. Religion incorporates literature, poetry, art, music, dance, architecture, and more, into a framework that advises people on how to live and addresses most aspects of human life, whereas science just says, “Show me what I want to see.”

Where religion teaches kindness, charity, decency and humility, science presents endless possibilities, stripped of morals, ethics or aesthetics, like doors that open dark rooms full of unforeseen consequences. Science loves unforeseen consequences. “Unforeseen consequences” is where science gets all of its new material. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no fan of medieval Christianity, but I’d no sooner march for science, in the way it is practiced today, than I would march in support of the Inquisition.

I talked to Suzelle briefly after the SoHum values conference in Redway a couple of weeks ago. We talked about how much the War on Drugs overshadows everything in this community. We also talked about how much hardship cannabis consumers have endured under prohibition. I said “There’s a debt that’s owed,” meaning that I thought the people who made their fortunes from the injustice of prohibition owe a debt to the people who endured that violence, injustice and discrimination for so long.

I’m sorry I said that. Not that I don’t think there’s truth in it, but the truth is bigger than that, and I think this community has a lot of healing to do, and needs to take care of itself, first. Besides, some people here have consistently worked for legalization. They worked for it, voted for it, and supported it openly, even though it made them more vulnerable, and threatened the income they earned from producing and selling marijuana. I applaud those people. I wish we had more of them, and I certainly don’t fault them. A lot of them are now involved with building a new legal cannabis industry, and I wish them success.

I realize I don’t always say things in the most sensitive way possible, but I want to make myself clear, and I know that I am talking to battle-hardened veterans of the War on Drugs. I care about this community. I live here, and you are my neighbors, and I’m very worried about what I see going on around here.

I’m proud of what this community has accomplished, and I agree with Owl, who spoke up at the conference to say, “We should be proud of our heritage.” We should be proud of what we did to get cannabis to the people, despite the overwhelming violence and oppression, of the War on Drugs, for all those years. That was an absolutely heroic effort, and we should be proud of it. We should also be proud of the work we did to end the War on Drugs. If you haven’t already done some of that work, there’s still time. Go ahead and write a check to NORML. They still need it, and so do you.

The War on Drugs has taken far more than we realize from all of us. There’s a lot of pain behind the windshields of those giant trucks, and there’s not one of us who hasn’t been scarred by it, even if it’s only by the fact that we’ve become so dependent on it, economically, as a community. We’ve become so economically dependent on it that we just can’t face life without it. We’re terrified of the very idea of it, and it’s the very last thing we want to think about. Since we’re the kind of people who prefer to do things, rather than think about them, we just keep doing our thing and try not to think about it.

We’re caught between two gorgons. On one side, we have the awful horror of the War on Drugs, in which we were heroes, but on which we’ve come to depend. On the other side, we can’t bear the horror of life in Humboldt County without the windfall black-market profits the War on Drugs brings. We just can’t face reality. Instead, we live in denial.

We cope by living in our own delusion and concocting a mythology that has come completely unhinged from reality. By now, I’m sure I’ve written enough about this cultural schizophrenia to fill a book, but here it is in a nutshell. Here, in our denial, behind the Redwood Curtain, we hide within our tidy wholesome mythology of “Mom and Pop,” “back-to-the-land” growers, growing superior, world renowned marijuana of unapproachable quality by practicing impeccable watershed stewardship and sustainable, all organic, biodynamic, permaculture farming practices.

Meanwhile, back in reality, Google Earth shows a vast network of clear-cuts, garbage dumps and stream diversions connected by a million miles of quad trails and illegal roads. Like the original Emerald City in The Wizard of OZ, what goes on here only looks good if you wear the special sunglasses that make the grime of the black-market sparkle like gemstones. Everything is beautiful here in paradise, just don’t take off those special glasses.

In our mythological future, this area will become recognized as the best place in the world to grow cannabis, and we will grow pot of such superior quality, that most cannabis consumers, being discerning, cultured people of considerable means, will insist that only Humboldt grown cannabis can satisfy their palette, and they will happily pay a premium for it. Besides, the black market will persist indefinitely because people would rather buy their weed from a drug-dealer, than pick it up at the supermarket. In this mythology, we can all just keep doing what we are doing, and do more of it than ever.

While it is true that the cannabis industry is exploding right now, and some people are going to make HUGE amounts of money from it, everything about this industry is changing incredibly fast. Within this crucible, profit margins will shrink until competition gives way to consolidation. In this process, even if the industry settles here, most of Humboldt County’s growers will get squeezed out of the business. That’s the reality that’s coming down the pike with legalization.

The pot business has always been a game for gamblers. I know that nobody really feels much sympathy for drug dealers squeezed out of the black-market, and I doubt anyone will start a charity for them anytime soon, but we are talking about most of our community now. Most of the people we know, most of the people who were born and raised here, and most of the people who built this community and make it unique, will be squeezed out of the marijuana industry, including all of the bright, imaginative and creative people who have come to rely on it to support their creativity.

Most of our community will be squeezed-out of the marijuana industry by greedy, ruthless business-people with major capital behind them. It is already well underway. That’s why we don’t want the marijuana industry in Humboldt County. Large-scale industrial agriculture does not make a good neighbor, nor does it belong on steep slopes in wild habitat. More importantly, it’s not who we are.

We didn’t come here to ruthlessly corner the market of a new industry. We came here to get out of the rat race, to breathe fresh air, hear the birds sing and walk in the woods. We made art. We played music and we told stories. Marijuana reminded us why those things mattered to us, so we made space for them, shared them and celebrated them. Marijuana reminded us why those things mattered, and the War on Drugs reminded us why marijuana mattered, so we learned to grow that too, in secret little patches hidden deep in the forest.

It was risky. You couldn’t trust people who didn’t grow. If you neglected to start seeds, your neighbor might just drop a few seedlings off at your place just to make sure you put a crop in. To be accepted by this community, you practically had to grow, and the stress of it was palpable. You could feel it in town. This was a war zone, and the sound of a helicopter on a hot Summer day still sends most people around here into a panic attack.

We lost a lot of great people in the War on Drugs. A lot of them got busted, some more than once. A lot of people turned to alcohol and other drugs to deal with the stress, some artists more or less abandoned their art, because weed money came so much easier. The black-market had a corrosive effect on the community, and the longer it continued, the more this place attracted a criminal element motivated by greed. Meanwhile, it took almost 40 years for the people to rise up and demand an end to Cannabis prohibition, and the government fought the people at every turn. Today, cannabis is still only legal in states where voters have the power of referendum.

Here, we have so thoroughly internalized the oppression of the War on Drugs that it has blinded us to our options, and stunted our economic diversity. As we move towards legalization, and the price of pot continues to slide, people just keep producing more weed. The art, music, stories, and community celebration gets squeezed-out, replaced with more boring hard work, the rat race, and Netflix by satellite. Nobody’s got time to walk in the forest anymore. They’ve got tarps to pull, soil to move and plants to tend. Prohibition squeezed this community into the marijuana industry, and now the marijuana industry is squeezing the life out of this community. That’s just part of what the War on Drugs has done to us, but the war is far from over for us.

The War on Drugs has affected how we think and how we see the world, and our collective schizophrenia is affecting our ability to make realistic decisions and plan for the future. Consequently, the impacts of the War on Drugs will be felt here for generations to come. While cannabis consumers have paid an enormous price in the War on Drugs, having paid it honestly, they will heal more quickly and recover more completely. For many here, the War on Drugs has crippled them, because they can’t even imagine another way of living, and it has become central to their identity. We face serious challenges, as a community, as we move towards legalization, but to face those challenges, we must first face reality.

A couple of weeks ago I attended the Southern Humboldt Community Values Conference at the Mateel Community Center in Redway. As soon as I heard about this event, I knew I had to attend. I knew I had to attend because:

I wanted to see who in Southern Humboldt cares enough about community values to show up to an event at 9:00 am on a Sunday morning in April without the lure of alcohol or music. I wanted to meet those people, and…

I genuinely care about community values.

These days, people endure enormous economic stress. Economic stress compromises, corrupts and crushes values, as well as the people who cling to them. This economy grinds values into garbage just as efficiently as it does redwood trees, rhinoceroses or the rest of us. If you value anything more than money, I think it more important than ever to remind yourself why, and to draw strength from that knowledge. If we share values as a community, we can share that knowledge, and reinforce those values, to make our community stronger and more cohesive. Really, I understand the importance of community values, but I also understood the motivation for this conference.

The Southern Humboldt Values Conference was sponsored by an organization called SHC, which supports and lobbies on behalf of cannabis growers. They had the idea to use Southern Humboldt’s “community values” as a marketing tool, to help them promote and sell their branded cannabis products. They constructed the conference so that no matter what happened, at the end of it, they would have a list of value statements that they could then distill down to a logo that they could slap on product labels and use in advertising to convince cannabis consumers that their pot was worth more money than pot grown elsewhere.

Basically, the Southern Humboldt Community Values Conference was a scheme, dreamed up by pot growers, to cash-in on anyone left in SoHum who cares about anything but money. You didn’t even have to care that much. At the conference, all you had to do, to express your values, was to show up and give them lip-service. You didn’t have to live them, invest in them, or practice them; they just had to sound good to you on a sober Sunday morning in April.

About 30 people showed up to participate in the conference, and another 10-15 straggled in late, missing most of the process. In other words, more than 99% of the SoHum community had better things to do. When you consider that at least a few of the participants were motivated by the potential ad campaign they hoped to create, you would have to admit that “community values,” on their own, are not a big draw in SoHum, but now that we’ve done the hard work of establishing our “community values,” what shall we do to instill them in the rest of our community?

For instance, one of the value statements we generated was some word-salad gobbledygook about how much we love the natural environment. All of the value statements we generated at the conference came out as such convoluted and poorly written sentences that I could not summon the energy to write them down. I found it embarrassing to have even participated in composing them, and I would have been even more embarrassed for anyone to see them written in my notebook. I do recall, however, that this word-salad value statement about how much we love the natural environment, contained the phrase, “we honor the cycles of nature.”

That sounds good, right? I’m down with it. I think we should honor and respect all of nature, including human nature, so sure, if we can at least get “the cycles of nature” into our community values statement, that’s great. At least “honor the cycles of nature” implies that nature is alive. As I recall, the rest of that value statement referred to the natural environment in terms of how we consume it, using words like “scenic beauty” and “peace and quiet,” but we all agreed on, and adopted, “honor the cycles of nature” as part of our cherished community values, while we ignored other values like eloquence and clarity entirely.

I mean, it’s bad enough that light-dep and mixed-light growers waste panda plastic by the truckload, create noise and light pollution that disrupts wildlife behavior, and that they pollute and destroy critical habitat here in SoHum, but none of that conflicts with our newly adopted community values. On the other hand, light-dep and mixed-light growers definitely cheat the cycles of nature, for profit, which is clearly not in accord with our stated community values. Should we tolerate this heinous affront to our shared community values here in Southern Humboldt?

Often community values conflict with economic opportunity. People who believe in community values, will uphold the values of their community, no matter how ridiculous they seem, or how much they cost, in terms of missed economic opportunities, because it’s more important to most people to be a part of a community than it is to be rich and alone in secret. That’s the paradox of community values in Southern Humboldt. Here in SoHum, we have a whole community of people who have decided that they would rather be rich and alone in secret, than uphold community values.

Humboldt’s growers should realize that the people who buy their product are all expected to uphold community values, every day, even if they work for minimum wage, which a lot of them do. Even the poor and homeless are constantly reminded to uphold community values, so I doubt that anyone will be willing to pay much of a premium for it in their marijuana. Think about how many marijuana consumers have been kicked out of school, discriminated against in the workplace, and persecuted by law enforcement, because they smoke marijuana, and how much that has cost them in terms of lost income, pain and suffering, and then think about how much these people have paid for weed over the years, because of prohibition. How much chutzpah does it take to imply that there is anything like “fair trade” going on here?

Besides the gobbledygook about the natural environment, we had one value statement that involved respect for counter-cultures, and talked about accepting refugees from all wars, but within it, we included the phrase “we speak in code and privacy is key.” That’s very important to remember when dealing with people in Southern Humboldt.

Nothing you hear, here in SoHum, really means what you think it does. When they say “community,” in SoHum, they mean “growers.” When they say “our diverse community,” they mean, “Some of us grow headband; some of us grow blue dream, and some of us grow OG, but the people who work in our grocery stores, at the bank, or even on our own farms, don’t count.” “Privacy is is key” means “you’ll never find out what we are up to unless we get busted for it.”

The truest, most relevant, and elegantly stated value statement of the entire conference came, near the end, from a cheerful, bright-eyed young woman who obviously knows this community well. She said, “It’s kinda like we all killed the same person and we’ve all been covering it up.”

That’s pretty close to the truth. Since the casualties of the War on Drugs number in the millions by now, it would have been more accurate to use the plural form of the noun, but after a long day of torturing the English language, I really appreciated the honesty and eloquence.

The War on Drugs is a horrible crime against humanity, and if we ever manage to bring this bloody chapter in American History to a close, we should make sure that it never happens again, but there’s one thing I miss about the whole police-state, lock-’em-up-and-throw-away-the-key attitude of the ’80s and ’90s. Back when you could still go to jail for growing weed, drug dealers used to keep a low profile, and they kept their mouths shut. I miss that.

These days drug dealers never shut up, and the more they talk, the dumber they sound and the uglier they look. I realize that they’re just trying to organize, raise their profile, and lobby on their own behalf, but the more they do it, the creepier it gets. They can’t help it. They have an untenable position. War profiteers hate to see wars end, but they should know better than to complain about it in a room full of veterans, widows and orphans.

I didn’t realize just how dumb and repulsive drug dealers really were, until I heard them complain about the falling price of marijuana. Really, you should keep that to yourselves. The people out there forking over large sums of cash for paltry quantities of cannabis don’t feel your pain. They probably don’t even like you, and only tolerate your company because you have weed. If they could get it somewhere else, for even a dollar less, they’d do it in a heartbeat.

Complaining about the falling price of cannabis, and lobbying politicians to keep prices high, didn’t win “The Humboldt Brand” any friends among cannabis consumers. We want the price of cannabis to fall further, much further. We want the price of cannabis to fall below what it costs to produce it in the forests of Humboldt County. We don’t care that this long overdue price correction will affect growers negatively. In fact, that’s what we want.

Putting dangerous drug dealers out of business has always been half the reason to legalize marijuana in the first place. Black market drug dealers earned their reputation for violence. Black market drug dealers earned their reputation for destroying communities, and black market drug dealers earned their reputation for destroying the environment. In one way, you could say that black market drug dealers helped the cause of legalization by creating more social and environmental problems than legal marijuana possibly could.

If Humboldt County growers want to convince us that they are anything but dangerous drug dealers, who should be driven out of business, complaining about the falling price of marijuana and lobbying to keep pot prices high doesn’t really help their cause. Complaining about the bad press they get every time another grower gets caught doing something horrendous to the forest, or someone gets killed at a grow scene, or in a drug deal, or another hash lab blows up, doesn’t really help their image either.

It doesn’t look good to be more concerned with how a problem affects your image than you are with the problem itself. We ignore sex trafficking, hard drugs and violent criminal gangs in our community, as well as way too much environmental damage and worker exploitation, just to protect the wholesome fiction of “Mom and Pop Grower,” and the “Small Farmer,” that we so desperately want to project to the world. We dismiss anyone who doesn’t fit into that happy, mythical stereotype as “a few bad apples” no matter how many of them we find.

Now they want us to call them “farmers” instead of “drug dealers.” They like the term “farmers” because farmers have political clout. Farmers also do a lot of environmental damage, but people cut farmers slack, because farmers produce food, and everyone needs food. Dope yuppies think we should treat them with the same deference and respect as we do farmers. Of course, real farmers, working flat, fertile land with a tractor, could put Humboldt County’s so-called “farmers” out of business, overnight, if it weren’t for the law. If the value of your product depends upon an army of law enforcement officers, courts and prisons to prevent honest business-people from competing with you, you’re a black market drug dealer, not a farmer.

Humboldt County growers know that they cannot compete with real farmers on a level playing field. They know that their income depends on the War on Drugs. They don’t care. They know that they have blood on their hands. They know that prohibition makes their operations profitable, and they don’t care who it hurts. They just want the money, so now they dismiss our concerns about the environmental damage they cause, by claiming that they’re not as bad as the timber industry or the wine industry. That’s one more unbelievably stupid thing that growers say all of the time now.

Growers tell us: “The marijuana industry hasn’t done nearly as much damage to the environment as the timber and wine industries, so give us a chance.” That’s like saying “Compared to Charlie Manson and Jeffery Dawmer, I’m a pretty nice guy.” The timber industry took 96% of all the old growth forest and practically drove the Humboldt Martin to extinction. The wine industry decimated native salmon populations. Thanks to the brilliant, government sanctioned land use practices of those two industries, we can’t afford to lose any more wildlife habitat to blind greed. Sorry folks. Cannabis is a beautiful plant, but what’s going on here is ugly, and unnecessary. Without prohibition and the black market, no one would ever dream of wasting so many resources to produce cannabis flowers as we do here in Humboldt County.

When it comes down to it, what’s good for the environment, is also good for cannabis consumers and the economy. Legalization should bring large scale production of commercial cannabis out of the forest and on to farmland, and into places where it can be grown most economically. Legalization should bring down the price of marijuana and eliminate the black market. This will hurt black market drug dealers in Humboldt County, who would, clearly, rather devour the forest like locusts, leaving mountains of grow garbage and useless consumer crap in their wake, than face a world in which selling weed at inflated, black market prices, was no longer an option for them.

I think Humboldt County growers realize they face a perception problem, but they haven’t quite figured out that the problem lies not so much with changing the way the world sees them, but rather with changing the way they see the world.

We don’t garden much, but this year we thought we’d grow some purple carrots, garlic chives and green onions in pots around our home. We stopped at Dazey’s garden supply store to look for some vegetable starts, because, as I recall, they used to have a pretty good selection in the Spring. When we got there, the place was mobbed. All around us people were piling sacks and loading and unloading trucks in every available space. We asked about plant starts. They told us they don’t do plants anymore.

They’d happily sell me a trimming machine, bubble bags, and all the soil and amendments I could ask for, but they had no plants at all in their “garden center.” They sent me to Sylvandale’s and Redway Feed, both of which, like Dazey’s, were hopping with customers, but unlike Dazey’s, actually had a few plants. Still, the selection seemed pretty slim at both locations.

Back in high school, I used to work in a garden center. We had more plants than all of the “garden centers” in SoHum put together. I mixed mountains of soil, filled thousands of flats with six-packs and soil and watered millions of tiny seedlings every year, for people who grew flowers and vegetables in their gardens. That’s why they called it a “garden center.” I guess we don’t even pretend to grow anything but pot around here anymore.

A friend of mine, who works at one of our local “garden canters” told me they had an order for 600 pallets of bagged soil (that’s well over 1,000 cubic yards of sterilized potting soil, packed into over 30,000 bags) for one customer. I have no idea how many tractor-trailer loads that comes out to, but the delivery driver is going to know that route well by the time it is all delivered. The garden center I worked at couldn’t move that that much soil in a decade, no matter how they sold it. Here, you could sell all the dirt on the planet to Humboldt County pot growers if you could just find enough trucks and drivers to deliver it.

Who’s got the time for a vegetable garden when you’ve got 30,000 bags of soil to open before you plant, and you pay almost as much for soil as you would for all the vegetables you could grow in it? If it doesn’t make sense to grow vegetables that way, why grow pot that way? If it weren’t for marijuana prohibition, no one would dream of cutting down trees or draining salmon streams, or hauling 600 pallets of sterilized potting soil, half-way across the state and ten miles up a muddy dirt road to a hole in the forest, to grow a common, hardy, agricultural staple. None of this makes any sense, outside of the War on Drugs, but it looks like we’ll see more Drug War madness in 2017 than we ever saw before.

2017 promises to be the biggest soil delivery season in Humboldt County history, and our roads are in the worst shape I’ve ever seen them. Just add the cost of the road damage, both to county roads, and to private roads and adjacent habitat, to the long litany of costs born by the community at large for the War on Drugs. I know you don’t want to think about that. You really don’t want to think about the millions of lives, lost and ruined, even though you know some of them. You don’t want to think about what it has done to you and your kids, and how it affects our community. You don’t want to think about what it says about our society, and what it is doing to the Earth. You don’t want to think about it, because you don’t want to know, and you don’t want to know because if you knew, you couldn’t do it. You wouldn’t do it. You wouldn’t tolerate it.

According to 2nd District Supervisor Estelle Fennell, so far, Humboldt County has only granted 19 cannabis cultivation permits, and they’re holding meetings all over Humboldt County to decide how to spend the tax money they collect from these few growers who paid the fees, made the improvements and submitted to inspections, and still dare to compete with the black market. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Humboldt County’s growers have opted to remain in the shadows to serve the nationwide black market.

The County received over 2,000 cannabis permit applications before the deadline last December. Most of those permit applications will never get approved. Growers knew that they could file a little paperwork and pay a fee that would keep the Sheriff out of their hair for a year or two. The black market has always had a cut and run attitude. The fact that over 2,000 people filed applications for permits, doesn’t mean that they intend to comply with state and county regulations, it just means that they intend to cut big this year. Instead of bringing the cannabis industry out of the shadows, Humboldt County’s cannabis permit program seems to have allowed a couple thousand growers to buy cover for all of them for one more big year in 2017. After that, we’ll see what’s left of Humboldt County.

What People Say:

If you haven't read john hardin's blog before, prepare to be shocked. I always am. (I can't help but enjoy it though...at least when I'm not slapping my hands on my computer desk and yelling at him.) He's sort of a local Jon Stewart only his writing hurts more because it is so close to people and places I love. Kym Kemp
...about, On The Money, The Collapsing Middle Class
... I think he really nails it, the middle class is devolving back into the working class. Pretty brilliant, IMO. Juliet Buck, Vermont Commons http://www.vtcommons.org/blog/middle-class-or-first-world-subsistence
BLOGS WE WATCH: John Hardin’s humorous, inappropriate, and sometimes antisocial SoHum blog is a one-of-a-kind feast or famine breadline banquet telling it like it is—or at least how it is through Mr. Hardin’s uniquely original point of view with some off-the-wall poetic licensing and colorful pics tossed in for good measure. For example, how it all went from this to that and how it all came about like the hokey pokey with your right foot out. You get the idea. Caution: this isn’t for everybody, especially those without a bawdy, bawdry, and tacky sense of humor. You know who you are. We liked it. (From the Humboldt Sentinel http://humboldtsentinel.com/2011/12/16/weekly-roundup-for-december-16-2011/)